Exponency in a Hybrid Lexicon: Plurals in Pennsylvania Dutch
Talks in Linguistics (TiL)
February 19, 2021
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Michael T. Putnam (Penn State University)
Abstract:
Once a Palatinate German-based koiné spoken exclusively throughout rural Southeastern Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Dutch (PD) is a language that has truly “outgrown its name” (Keiser, 2012:1), spoken now as an L1 by approximately 400,000 people worldwide. Native speakers of PD are diglossic bilinguals, speaking English and PD equally in their daily lives, predominantly within particular sociolinguistic domains. In this talk, I take a closer look at the formation of plurals in PD, focusing on exponency variation. A relevant and important question to raise is to what extent PD has retained 'German' aspects of its grammar in the face of +300 years of steady contact with American English. German, in both its standard register and in most of its dialects, require nominal elements to conform to a trochaic foot structure prior to Vocabulary Insertion (with /-s/ plurals being the principal exception). Building on ongoing research (Schuhmann & Putnam, in prep.), I model preliminary PD data from a late-insertion derivational model of grammar, Distributed Morphology (Marantz, 1997; Embick & Noyer, 2007), which has proven useful and efficient in modeling bilingual grammars (Lohndal & Westergaard, 2016; Lopéz, 2020). PD data shows a decrease in the role of prosodic conditioning of exponency (i.e., a relaxing of the trochaic requirement) and an increase in stem suppletion (i.e., ablaut) to license plural nominals. Finally, I discuss what these findings may mean in relation to larger-scale architectural issues, such as the integrated nature of bilingual grammars (Putnam et al., 2018) and the morphophonology of code-mixing (Stefanich et al., 2019).
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Date posted
Jan 19, 2021
Date updated
Feb 17, 2021